Prosecution of the Early Church - Essay Example

Prosecution only strengthened ideas and dogmas promulgated by the early church leaders and became a driven force of church expansion and developments. The period of the Early Church covers the periods when the books of the New Testament had been written. (100-4010 AD). The main record of the Church's earliest expansion depends on two divergent, but necessarily complementary literary sources; the Christian apologists and the pagan authors. The outline of the picture presented by both is remarkably consistent, though here and there details may be hazy and liable to more than one interpretation, very rarely however in matters of substance.

A further feature of Christian history is its continuity from the first century down to our own day; indeed it may be said of the Church that no other institution of comparable antiquity is so completely documented. The amount of original manuscript that survives is naturally infinitesimal in quantity compared with the volume of works preserved for us by generations of copyists; yet where it does exist, it rarely contradicts, and nearly always confirms the literary and historical tradition. Inscriptions form an important body of original material, but in an era of insecurity, and sometimes of actual persecution, purely Christian sentiments were more often not openly expressed.

Historians suppose that persecution of the Early Church has a great impact on its expansion and proliferation of its ideas to other territories and countries. The Early Days of the ChurchIn the earliest years, the Romans saw Christianity as a sect of Judaism. Suetonius, in his life of Claudius, records the expulsion of the Jews from Rome, who 'continually created disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus'. Suetonius apparently did not even realize that Chrestus, or Christ, was not a living Jewish leader of that time2.

The Jews themselves reacted strongly enough against the new religion which they regarded as striking at the very foundations of their law, and their opposition would have been far more formidable than in fact it was, had they not been temporarily annihilated politically after the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in 70. There is only a thin line dividing religious from political persecution, since the former is so often a pretext for the latter; thus, Pelikan is chiefly concerned with the relations of Christians with the civil power, and first and foremost with the civil power of Rome3.

It would be wrong to lay any but the ultimate responsibility for the martyrdom of St Polycarp and a few others at the door of Antoninus. In general he followed in the relatively humane policies of his predecessors Hadrian and Trajan, whereby Christians were not to be hunted down nor, if charged, condemned, unless they could be proved to have broken the laws--an escape clause which included refusal to sacrifice to the Emperor as a god. A long period of comparative peace for the Church was abruptly ended by the accession of Antoninus' adopted son, Marcus Aurelius (161-180)4.

The Period of Marcus AureliusA